Fortunately, there are news organisations that aren’t much interested in a contingency fee lawyer’s opinion of journalistic responsibilities or freedom of the press. The Verge (albeit before the warning letter) ran a piece about how Sony and other large studios with the help of their Washington lobbying front, the Motion Picture Association of America, are colluding with state attorneys general to gain the kind of control over Internet traffic they were denied when the Stop Online Piracy Act was blocked in the U.S. congress.

“We start from the premise that site blocking is a means to an end,” says MPAA general counsel Steven Fabrizio. “There may be other equally effective measures ISPs can take, and that they might be more willing to take voluntarily.” According to the email, the group has retained its own technical experts and is working with Comcast (which owns Universal) to develop techniques for blocking or identifying illegally shared files in transit.

While we of course have serious legal concerns about all of this, one disappointing part of this story is what this all means for the MPAA itself, an organization founded in part “to promote and defend the First Amendment and artists’ right to free expression.” Why, then, is it trying to secretly censor the Internet?

It’s exactly the kind of self-serving conduct that network neutrality advocates cite as the theoretical dangers of letting monopolistic companies do their own thing. Except now, it doesn’t seem so theoretical.

The irony is breathtaking. Meet the Internet freedom champion of 2014: North Korea.